NC schools get choice between minimum days, hours

RALEIGH, NC (AP) -- North Carolina's public school students could sit in classrooms for longer but for fewer days in a change to the long-running debate about the academic calendar.

The General Assembly this week passed legislation giving school districts the choice of complying with yearly minimums by meeting for 185 classroom days or 1,025 hours beginning in 2013. Schools previously had to meet minimums of both the number of hours and the number of days.

Leanne Winner of the North Carolina School Boards Association says the option means school districts could wrap up future years weeks earlier.

State Senate leader Phil Berger of Rockingham County says the changes are a compromise preserving the 10-week summer vacation guaranteed to tourism businesses while extending the school year from 180 days and allowing for bad-weather closings.

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You all can say more days more hours easily, because it's not you who have to endure the hours it's the ones in school. Japan may be leading in education but are they truly happy? I read a few years ago that many Japanese students commit suicide, because of the stress of passing a test that alters their life drastically. Is this what you want? For us to go to school longer, live less, and endure grueling hours of teachers who mostly don't know what their talking about? We don't need to live by the standards of the rest of the world; we need to live by the standards of the US.

Thats all well and fine if we were isolationists but in todays global economy we can no longer accept that we are the leaders in anything including education.
Effort expended has to increase in order to make our education system better and this effort means longer working hours for teachers and students.
Yes education is stressful, especially in Japan because getting into college is COMPETITIVE and not everyone makes it. We need to get back to that instead of dumbing down our system in the hopes that more will pass.
We are way too far behind in math science and technology already

Why the discussion of how to wrap up the year earlier?
Our education system is lagging behind other industrialized nations and you only have to look up a couple of countries to see the difference.
Our school year is 180 days.
But many others are running 220 days and have much longer school days.
What has happened to "us"? We used to cherish our education. It was something desirable and we worked hard at it. In Japan there's competition to get into colleges.
We have become lazy and complacent. We need to reinvigorate the education system, and to start, lets expand the school day to at least 8.5 to 9 hours, and the school year to 200 days, if not more.

I have noticed it is the college students who leave tourism businesses in early August, but colleges aren't regulated as to start and stop dates. But the legislators know how to run schools better than anyone else. Just ask them, they'll be glad to tell you how much smarter they are than education professionals.

School should start on the Tuesday after Labor Day and get out on the Friday before Memorial Day. U can get 180 days in the time frame and still have 1 week for Easter and 2 weeks for the Christmas Holidays. Thank you

Look at the length of the school year and school day in other countries to see why we are lagging behind other industrialized nations in education.
Japan is like 220 days and Germany is also a higher number of days.
We need to make education something people want to get, want to put effort into instead of being a necessary evil.

From a business perspective it also makes no sense to allow these facilities to sit idle 185 days per year.....